Start A Community Theater in the Country

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SOME MINOR COMPLICATIONS

Unfortunately, we had no "boards" on which to stage our productions. On top of that . . . we had no money.

The first difficulty was solved rather readily. It was our good fortune that the town had recently built a new high school and abandoned the old building. Furthermore, the discarded structure had a marvelous stage and a big, beautiful auditorium . . . going unused.

We approached our superintendent of schools with the idea that we would utilize this empty school for the good of the community. When we agreed (right quick!) to admit students free of charge to all productions, we were granted unlimited use of the building at no cost to us.

The money question was a little harder to conquer . . . but not much! For a start, each member-family contributed $5.00, but the total collected wasn't nearly enough. The only answers we could come up with were [1] to search for patrons (at $5.00 a head) for an organization that existed in name only, and [2] to sell advertising space (at $10, $15, and $25 per ad) in a playbill for a play that hadn't even been chosen yet.

Despite the "iffy" nature of our undertaking, the business community responded to our plea with generosity. In a matter of days, we had the capital to finance the scripts, production costs, and royalties for our first play: Blithe Spirit.

THE PLAY'S THE THING

When it's time to pick a play, you'll have a wide range of farces, mysteries, comedies, tragedies, classics, musicals, etc. to choose from. In fact, there are dramas available to satisfy the taste of any community. We've found it best just to write to Samuel French, Inc. (Dept. TM EN, 25 West 45th Street, New York, New York 10036) and Dramatists Play Service, Inc. (Dept. TMEN, 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016) for their free catalogs, which cover almost all the plays known in the English language.

The lists contain brief descriptions of each drama, indicate the number of characters, the sets required, and the royalties that must be paid. Naturally, the newer and more famous-the vehicle, the higher the royalty is likely to be. But once a play is old enough to become a part of the "public domain" (Shakespeare's Othello, for instance), no fees are required.

There is a catch to putting on such "free" classics, however, because while there may be no fee on (for example) the original Ibsen version of The Master Build er, there are royalties to pay on the "revised and rewritten" editions sold by play services. The trick, therefore, is to get paperback copies of the original "classics" and then do any necessary rewriting yourself.

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